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The people of the Himalayas believe the gods live in the high mountains, and that summits are sacred places. Everest was once known as Chomolungma, meaning “Goddess Mother of Mountains”. After the Chinese invaded Tibet their authorities decreed that the mountain would again be known by that name, rather than Everest (named after the surveyor who had first mapped the region for the British). Before leaving the summit in 1953, Tenzing buried some sweets and biscuits as an offering to the Buddhist gods of the mountain.

In 1951, as my father and other members of the Reconnaissance expedition gazed upon the southern slopes of Mt. Everest, did they wonder what gods they might encounter here?

As they peered into the lower reaches of the vast Western Cwm and up towards the towering Lhotse face, it was clear that whatever god or gods protected the mountain were going to make them work hard for the privilege of entering its Elysian snow fields. Mountaineers entering these high realms have been known to get a strong case of religion.

Looking up the Western Cwm towards the Lhotse face, gateway to the summit.

Not so my father. He was inclined towards practical thinking and was already well into his medical training when he first figured out a potential southern route to the summit in the basement of the Royal Geographical Society in 1951. The son of middle class expatriates living in Malaya, he had attended the public school of Marlborough, and therefore shared something of the gentleman’s club background of the British climbing establishment. However, he admitted to none of the sense of entitlement and rejection of professionalism that had plagued British mountaineering in particular, and British athletics in general, for years. (This issue was tellingly investigated in the Oscar-winning film about the British runners at the 1924 Olympic games, Chariots of Fire). The Alpine Club, home to generations of British climbers, was the Club of Clubs when it came to extolling the virtues of gung-ho amateurism over targeted training and systematic preparation.

My father was also well acquainted with Everest history, and the long series of British failures on the mountain. Already well into his training for an eventual career as a surgeon, he thought scientifically and methodically, and was determined to make sure none of the avoidable mistakes of the past would be repeated to keep the British from claiming their prize. Little did he know how much of an uphill struggle this would prove to be.

He knew about Mallory and Irving who, in 1924, had disappeared from sight en route to the summit.

The last photo of Mallory and Irvine.

He knew about the inadequate clothing, faulty equipment, bad hygiene, and the British abhorrence of taking anything more than an amateur approach to the laws of physics and anatomy during the course of preparations for Himalayan mountaineering. Reading the accounts by some of these Everest veterans one could be forgiven for thinking that it was better to martyr oneself on the mountain rather than admit scientific thinking into the climbing equation. “Muscular Christianity” was an ideology of embracing God through athleticism that came to prominence in the Victorian era and had become pervasive in the climbing world. Over the years Muscular Christianity had demanded — and received — a large volume of human sacrifice from its acolytes: toes and fingers from the frost-bitten limbs of those who survived, everything else from those who did not. Later in his career, my father became the go-to expert on frost-bite because of his success with preventing amputation.

The Everest problem, for my father, was the problem of high altitude – in particular the last thousand feet, where the human body enters a realm it is not naturally equipped to survive.

High on the Lhotse face.

Here the air is so thin and cold, that, without supplementary oxygen, the human body starts to shut down, even though the owner keeps walking. Trouble was, no one had been able to lick the oxygen problem. Flawed thinking and faulty equipment meant more often than not that oxygen sets appeared to make things worse and were abandoned by frustrated climbers who often felt they intruded on the “pure” mountaineering experience anyway. Thus, as he approached the summit, the living climber turned into the walking dead. He just didn’t know it yet. The history of high altitude climbing is littered with tales of those returning victorious or otherwise from the upper reaches of the mountain only to die as they descend: literally stopped dead in their tracks.

One of scores of dead bodies to be seen on Everest today.

My father spent his whole career railing against those who resisted the so-called “cheat” of having safety oxygen available at all high camps. Several superb mountaineers he had climbed with died needlessly on other people’s expeditions, he felt, because they did not have back-up oxygen for emergencies. Alan Rouse, who had climbed with him on the first ascent of Mt. Kongur in China, died on K2, sitting in his tent, left behind by his companions, drowning in his own bodily fluids as he spoke to his pregnant girl-friend by radio.

Alan Rouse (l), Michael Ward (c), Chris Bonington (r). London, 1980.

My dad felt events like these turned mountaineering into a blood sport, and his disdain for its practitioners knew no bounds.

“The most inhospitable place on Earth”: the South Col.

For my father in 1951, the solution to the Everest problem lay not in faith – faith in the human spirit’s ability to endure beyond what was endurable simply through brute physical force and mystical will-power – but in a thoughtful, well-researched and practical application of scientific principles to the challenges of high altitude, cold, and the limitations of the human body to function in both. The question was: how to overcome these challenges, and who was the man to lead the way?

Looking down the Lhotse face

After he had figured out the route and approached the Himalayan Committee about putting together a Reconnaissance expedition, he made inquiries which led him to the name of Griffith Pugh. Thus it was that my father found himself walking into the gaunt edifice that was the Medical Research Council’s Division of Human Physiology in Hampstead.

In Harriet Tuckey’s probing new biography of Pugh, Everest – The First Ascent (whose revelations amount to a re-writing of accepted Everest history), she describes their fateful first meeting. It’s an iconic scene, straight out of a movie. After finding no receptionist at the front door, “Ward searched along wide, dark corridors, eventually finding Pugh’s laboratory on the second floor. Entering the laboratory past crowded shelves of scientific equipment, Ward was confronted with a large, white Victorian enamel bath in the middle of the room, full to the brim with water and floating ice-cubes. In the bath lay a semi-naked man whose body, chalk-white with cold, was covered in wires attached to various instruments. His blazing, red hair contrasted sharply with the ghostly white pallor of his face. The phantom figure was Dr. Griffith Pugh undertaking an experiment into hypothermia. Ward had arrived at the crisis point when rigid and paralysed by cold, the physiologist had to be rescued from the bath by his own technician. Ward stepped forward to help pull him out of the freezing water. So began a long, fruitful collaboration and friendship.”

Pugh, a brilliant physiologist, Olympic skier, and trainer of high-altitude commandos during the war, not only knew his science but also thought outside the box. Eventually he would reassess every aspect of equipment, diet, hygiene, and physical training in order to overcome the problems of “the last thousand feet of Everest”. In effect, the successful outcome of the ’53 expedition would have been impossible without this application of scientific thinking to an intractable series of problems. Pugh’s work revolutionized all sports that took place in the mountains, and paved the way for a whole new field of scientific inquiry, what my father would refer to as “a cornucopia of science”.

Hilary and Tenzing en route to the summit of Everest, wearing the open circuit oxygen sets that Griff Pugh had diligently refined.

But in order to achieve this Pugh would have to win over not only resistant climbers, but also the entrenched, anti-science culture of the Himalayan Committee that was running the show. It was a struggle every bit as epic as the quest to ascend the world’s highest mountain, and the true story of what actually happened, and the full measure of Pugh’s contribution, was suppressed for many years by those in a position to do so. It is only with the publication of Harriet Tuckey’s book that this riveting story – which in fact is far more interesting and inspiring than the hitherto accepted orthodoxy — has been made public for the first time.

In these fascinating extracts from a scientific film that Pugh assembled with the aid of Tom Stobart (the official Everest cameraman) and George Lowe (who shot the high altitude sequences), we can see some of the issues he was tackling.

After his experiences on the Cho Oyu expedition in 1952, a dry-run for Everest itself, Pugh insisted on an extended period of acclimatisation for the team. The benefits were enormous.

Another major factor contributing to the success in ’53 was an increase in food and fluid intake, per Pugh’s recommendations. He made sure to pack each climber’s rucksack with favorite delicacies for consumption at high altitude, where appetites were normally depressed.

My father found working on the science of high altitude with Pugh utterly absorbing, and it stimulated an interest he was to pursue for the rest of his life. Here he assists Pugh with a step-test in an experiment at Advanced Base Camp (21,000 ft.), just above the icefall.

My father’s interest in the effects of high altitude dovetailed perfectly with his career as a clinician and surgeon. When Pugh decided to put together the first dedicated expedition to research high altitude physiology, my father immediately came on board.

The Silver Hut expedition of 1960/61, in which a group of mountaineer-researchers lived at 19,000 feet for six months, performing a wide range of experiments upon themselves, jump-started a whole new field of research in spectacular fashion.

Riding a stationary bike inside the Silver Hut. My father would later continue these experiments high on the Makalu Col.

The constant round of experiments was alleviated by skiing —

Griff Pugh skiing with the Silver Hut mascot, Rakpa.

— and by the ascent of local unclimbed peaks.

Ward and Gill, barely visible dots just below the summit of Rakpa Peak (named after the Silver Hut mascot).

My dad led a successful first ascent of the spectacular “Matterhorn of the Himalayas”, Ama Dablam, narrowly avoiding disaster on the way down when a sherpa broke his leg and had to be carried down on the backs of others, and sometimes swung like a pendulum off the peak’s precipitous rock faces. It was the first ever winter ascent, alpine-style, of a Himalayan peak; it was another eighteen years before the mountain would be climbed again.

The second attempted ascent of the expedition, of Makalu (the world’s fifth highest peak at 27,825 ft.), did not have such a happy outcome. Bad weather plus a series of accidents and collapses owing to high altitude resulted in the entire party being stranded at different camps high on the mountain.

Pete Mulgrew who collapsed near the summit of Makalu. Note frostbite on his fingers and nose.

If it hadn’t been for the presence of safety oxygen and the determined good sense of the one relatively inexperienced mountaineer in the party, John West, who climbed back up the mountain to see where everyone was, many could have died, including my father. He described his own rescue, after being stranded alone at 24,000 ft. for two days, thus: “At about 11 o’clock that morning I had my first brush with consciousness again. This was John West’s bearded face gazing at me. I remembered his teeth very well. They looked remarkably clean.” (The whole enterprise is described vividly in Harriet Tuckey’s book and my father’s autobiography, In This Short Span).

The work at the Silver Hut led ultimately to my father writing the first wide-ranging text book in the field of high altitude medicine and physiology, and subsequent editions were co-written with two other members of the team: Jim Milledge and John West. Jim gave a most moving, and entertaining, address at my father’s funeral.

Michael Ward

However, up to his death, my father, like Griffith Pugh, continued to suffer the scorn and cold shoulder of the leader of the ’53 expedition, John Hunt, and his acolytes. There were many reasons for this. As Medical Officer my father had to order Hunt to go down the mountain when he felt his deteriorating condition and insistence on “leading from the front” during the perilous ascent of the Lhotse Face was endangering not only the expedition but also lives.

There was also a heated confrontation over Hunt’s tactics for the final assault, in particular his choices concerning the setting up of high camps for the summit attempts. My father felt Hunt was compromising the chances for success of the first assault party of Tom Bourdillon and Charles Evans by establishing their final camp too far from the summit. His misgivings were proved correct when the climbers had to turn back within sight of the top. Problems with their closed-circuit oxygen equipment, untested at high altitude, had delayed their progress. Pugh had warned Hunt this was likely to happen with the closed-circuit sets, which were a newer, more complex technology than the open-circuit design which Hilary and Tenzing, the second summit party, were to use. The controversy over Hunt’s strategy remains unresolved.

Here is Pugh’s discussion of the closed-circuit oxygen sets used during the first assault on the summit:

John Hunt

Hunt was a military man, and a fine leader in many ways (though not as strong a climber as the rest of the team), but he was definitely of the “Muscular Christianity” school of mountaineering. Harriet Tuckey: “He told his wife that on Everest he had carried with him a feeling that the hand of God was guiding him towards his goal. This sense of being chosen by God coloured the way he framed the official history of the expedition.” Which meant that science was largely relegated to the appendices of the official expedition book written by Hunt, and when mentioned at all in the official film of the expedition, made to seem like part of his own inspired leadership. There was barely a word of attribution for Griffith Pugh, the true architect of the boots Hunt had walked in, the clothes Hunt had worn, the food Hunt had eaten, the tents Hunt had slept in, and the smoothly functioning oxygen sets that had saved Hunt’s life on the Lhotse face and lifted Hillary and Tenzing to the summit.

Tenzing Norgay and Ed Hillary after summiting Everest.

In the introduction to the new edition of my father’s book, Everest: A Thousand Years of Exploration, the distinguished French mountaineer Eric Vola does not mince words in his appraisal of Hunt and his animosity towards my father.

He recounts an extraordinary episode which took place in 1973, at the 20th Anniversary Celebration at the Royal Geographical Society when my father spoke about the contribution of science to the success of the expedition. Afterwards Hunt came up to him, furious, and started shouting: “No one wants to hear about that science!”

Faced with the ironic silence of my dad (ah, how well I remember the futility of arguing with those silences), who was by then a distinguished senior Consultant Surgeon, Hunt became apoplectic: “I hate scientists”, he fulminated. Then he turned to another member of the expedition and said: “Someone should shut Ward up”.

The Everest team in Snowdonia: my father stands to the left of the group; Hunt, in black sweater, is in the middle.

At home my father remained remarkably sanguine about all of this. His greatest frustrations derived from having various expeditions to remote corners of Asia cancelled at the last minute because of local political instabilities, and having to deal with the officious bureaucrats of the National Health Service and their equivalents in the unions. On one memorable occasion, when the umpteenth strike closed down his operating room, he called up a fleet of taxis to pick up his patients and drive them through the picket lines to another hospital so he could continue his scheduled operations without interruption.

He was a dedicated believer in socialized medicine to the end, eschewed private practice (not for him the cultivation of an unguent bedside manner), and during his very active tenure as Master of the Apothecaries (the City of London’s oldest Guild) he implemented a number of forward-thinking programs in international medical co-operation. Foremost amongst these involved bringing his own specialized knowledge and experience to bear on the problems of medical relief after natural disasters in Third World countries.

His retirement from clinical work also saw a focusing on his many scholarly areas of interest, with articles being published in leading medical and mountaineering journals on a regular basis. Even a horrendous car accident in no way dulled his mind, which seemed ever ready for adventure. After completing his seminal Everest history, he turned to consolidating his lifelong interest and research into the extraordinary accomplishments of the pundits, native surveyors who mapped vast tracts of Central Asia for the British in secret, using the most basic tools and formidable memory. He had in fact learned these techniques himself, applying them in part on the Everest Reconnaissance of 1951, and more thoroughly during his trips to Bhutan in 1964 and ’65. (He used to practice being a pundit during walks in London’s Richmond Park — apparently much to my bewilderment as a toddler). A book was to be forthcoming, but his death curtailed the project until it was taken on by Richard Sale. The resulting volume, Mapping the Himalayas: Michael Ward and the Pundit Legacy, opens yet another window into his lifetime’s journey of exploration and scientific inquiry.

A page from my father’s 1951 Everest Reconnaissance diary, depicting the approach to the Western Cwm.

Looking at reproductions of pages from his Everest and Bhutan diaries enables one to share some of the same excitement he must have felt as he navigated through the icefall or looked upon the remote Lunana region, Bhutan’s own Shangri-La. He somehow always managed to be amongst the first Westerners to see these wonders.

Trekking through Lunana

Taktsang Monastery

Given the history of his fractured relationship with the Hunt establishment in British mountaineering, it was all the more striking – and gratifying – that when my father died the fulsome obituaries went out of their way to give him the full credit denied him in his lifetime for the many areas of pioneering work he brought to the worlds of mountaineering, exploration and high altitude medicine. I was stunned to see The New York Times give him equal space with the legendary civil rights activist Rosa Parks. These were two indomitable characters who I think would have liked each other if they had met.

Escaping the heat in the Arun River, en route to Everest 1951.

His funeral was remarkable for its celebratory nature, and revelatory in a way that he would have been profoundly moved by. Several elderly gentlemen, who had traveled long distances to attend, were amongst the congregation in the packed church, and were unknown to both myself and my mother. It turned out that they had been medical students under my father’s tutelage. He had inspired in them equal parts terror of what would happen to them if they made a mistake or forgot some obscure fact, and complete devotion to the practice of good medicine. That he had so inculcated in them the spirit of excellence, intellectual honesty, and moral integrity was a legacy he would have been proud of above all others.

The approach to Mt. Kongur in China (climbed by my father’s expedition in 1981), seen across Lake Karakul.

To me, personally, he was a remote figure in many ways, the result of his own emotionally undernourished childhood. It was therefore a treat to see him bond so completely with my daughter, who, upon meeting him for the first time, declared that he was “Dodo”. He wore his new name like a badge of honor. My greatest regret is that I didn’t sit down with him, with a tape recorder, and just talk. Get all the stories. All the knowledge. All his insights into a time when true explorers roamed the earth and walked off the map and had adventures the rest of us can only dream of.

He was a daunting figure in his accomplishments and no-nonsense disposition. His competitive streak, combined with a disregard for the niceties, could make him seem brusque, somewhat remote. But, in truth, he was a man of deep feeling: a remarkable man from a remarkable generation of men who, like the great British film director David Lean, were always looking to the far horizon, then tried to figure out the most interesting way of getting there.

Everest 1951: Ward and head Sherpa Angtharkay looking across Tibet from the Menlung Pass.

Michael Ward climbing in North Wales.

This is the third and final part of my reminiscences about my father’s role in the First Ascent of Everest and the 1951 Reconnaissance Expedition. You can read Part 1 – “Watching Dad on Everest” here, and Part 2 – “My Dad, the Yeti, and Me” here.

In fact, by the time this photo was carried on the cover of every newspaper on the morning of June 2nd, the climbers were back at Base Camp, having actually reached the summit on May 29th. But the news was held back for the morning of the Queen’s Coronation.

This is what Tenzing would have seen as he looked back down the way he had come, through the Western Cwm…

… and what he would have seen looking east towards Makalu, the fifth highest mountain in the world…

One of the perks of having my dad for a dad was the strain of unusual and exotic experiences that ran through my life as a result of being related to a Himalayan explorer, one of the team that first climbed Mt. Everest in 1953. For example, aged 6, having tea with the Queen of Bhutan and her family in a Kensington apartment, while a bodyguard named Rinzi, wielding a substantial saber and sidearm, stood guard nearby. (He was forever memorialized when I gave my childhood spaniel the same name: they shared a disposition of attentive watchfulness and deep brown eyes. And how many other London kids could say their faithful hound was named after a royal Bhutanese bodyguard? Thanks, Dad.)

When friends came down to the country for the weekend, we’d haul out my dad’s tent and camping gear. “What’s that smell?” my chums would ask, noses pinched.

“Yak!” I would respond with glee. God knows what ingredients actually created this odor. This stuff had been perched for a winter at 19,000 feet near Everest. Or was it a leftover from those epic treks through Bhutan, going to places no Westerner had ever been, venturing into terrain more Shangri-la than Shangri-la? No matter. The smell, though pungent, evoked Adventure with a capital ‘A’.

But the story which I got by far the most mileage from, and still do, is of the time my father encountered serious evidence of that legendary hobo of the Himalayas: the yeti, or abominable snowman.

I whisk out my phone and google ‘yeti footprints’. “There are photographs to prove it,” I declare, almost offended by the lack of faith.

“Those photos? Those are your dad’s photos?”

I nod my head, “Yup, next to the footprint that’s his boot”.

“Cool!”

Very.

Thanks again, Dad.

This is what happened.

Fall 1951, and the Everest Reconnaissance party had been making its way laboriously through the Khumbu icefall, tricky and dangerous work, trying to reach the Western Cwm. From there they could better see where a possible route to the summit may lie. My father writes in ‘Everest: One Thousand Years of Exploration’: “Towers of fragile ice fell without warning and crevasses continually opened and closed. The icefall had become an immense, unstable ruin, as though an earthquake had shaken the entire glacier.”

Various routes through the upper reaches of the icefall were attempted, then abandoned. Finally, a few days later, they broke through into the Western Cwm, only to be confronted by an immensely wide and deep crevasse which barred the entrance to the level valley of deep snow beyond.

“I started down one or two places where we thought it might just be possible to descend to the bottom of the snow-choked crevasses many feet below; but even if we could have reached these ‘bridges’, they might have collapsed, or we might have found that the near-vertical ice on the far side needed artificial climbing and the use of our small stock of suitable hardware….

“Eventually we gave up. I felt very frustrated by this decision, for here was a good piece of technical climbing which, as I was getting fitter, I would have liked to try…. But, as Bill Murray put it: ‘We had climbed up and we had climbed down the impossible! Gainsaying the pundits we had found a route up Everest. This route would go.’”

The main work done, the team split up into different groups to explore some of the surrounding country. My father, together with Eric Shipton and Sherpa Sen Tensing set off towards an unknown peak, “a glorious spire of pale pink granite, capped by snow.”

They named it ‘Menlungtse’, “after the stream that meandered through green meadows around its foot – a vast amphitheatre of pastureland glacier.

“For our crossing of the Menlung La, we were traveling together, unroped, at about 16-17,000 ft. It was at about midday that we came across some tracks on the snow of the glacier. Sen Tensing had no doubt in his mind as to what they were – yeti tracks. Questioned closely, he was quite adamant that he had seen similar tracks in Tibet and other parts of the Himalaya. Here there seemed to be two distinct sorts of track. One was well-defined in that individual prints had recognizable features such as toes; a second group was less well defined, with few if any individual features.

“The more interesting were the well-defined tracks, most of which were on a thin covering of snow over hard glacier snow-ice. Many, but not all, of the imprints were clear-cut, and there were a great many of them.”

They paused, chose one especially clear footprint, and took photos.

“These distinct tracks went down the glacier and we followed them for about half an hour before they turned off into a side moraine; we continued down the valley. The tracks went straight down the glacier, which was almost level but with some very narrow and shallow crevasses, perhaps about a foot or less wide. Where those crevasses had been crossed by a line of prints, it seemed as if a ‘claw’ had protruded beyond the imprint of each of the toes.

“About 48 hours later, Bourdillon and Murray followed the line of the yeti tracks further down the glacier, and both men noted in their diaries that, though deformed by wind and sun, the tracks took an excellent line down the glacier.”

Clearly whatever creature had made the tracks was every bit as good a navigator of high mountainous terrain as British climbers!

When released to the public, the photos, naturally, caused a sensation. They remain the one clear piece of photographic evidence for the yeti that is not easily explained away. Forever after, my father was plagued with accusations that he and Shipton had somehow “made up” the footprints as a practical joke, a possibility belied by the independent corroboration by the other two climbers.

Lacking any other definitive evidence for the yeti, my father’s own best theory for the cause of the footprints was a human: “Though neither Shipton nor I realized it at the time, the inhabitants of the Himalaya and Tibet can and do walk in the snow for long periods in bare feet without frostbite, and I was later to see this also in Bhutan and Tibet… “

He wrote papers on the subject for the Alpine Journal and Wilderness and Environmental Medicine, detailing a number of conditions that could result in enlarged toes and even deformities of the whole foot.

“The ‘claw marks’ observed in the Menlung prints could be explained by the presence of Onychogriffosis or ram’s horn nail…

The Silver Hut pilgrim: eating a pipette (left), and showing his bare feet.

In January 1961, during the Silver Hut expedition in the Everest region, a Nepalese pilgrim who normally lived at 6,000 ft. visited our research sites and lived for fourteen days at 15,300 ft. and above. Throughout this period he wore neither shoes nor gloves and walked in the snow and on rocks in bare feet with no evidence of frostbite. Moreover, he slept outside with no shelter, at measured temperatures of minus 13ºC, and managed to avoid hypothermia by controlled light shivering.”

The Silver Hut

What do I think? “There are more things in heaven and earth…” A few years ago an ABC News team was in the Everest region and came across yeti footprints. They were on the same glacier where my father and Eric Shipton had been in 1951.

Back on Everest, more drama was to follow. After a few days my father and his companions realized they had strayed into Chinese-occupied Tibet, a dangerous situation that could end up provoking an international diplomatic incident if they were discovered. It could imperil the whole Everest adventure. They decided to make a run for it at night, along the banks of the river that raged through the Rongshar gorge. This was the stuff of the adventure stories and movies my dad lapped up as a kid, but it was all somewhat more alarming when you found yourself actually in one for real.

The Rongshar gorge

“The thunder of the torrent beside the path reverberated against the canyon walls, drowning the noise of our footsteps as we passed quickly through Topte village, hoping that the Tibetan mastiffs, let off their chains at night, would not hear or smell us. In the dark we stumbled over roots and rocks – in places a tree ladder had to be climbed, and in one fearsome place the path was only a few branches wide, balanced on a cliff face thirty feet above the boiling river and held onto cracks in the rock by small twigs.

“At about 4am our ‘smuggling’ sherpas reckoned we were past the frontier and we stopped and slept at the side of the path. An hour later the sun came up and we were surprised by a group of six wild-looking Tibetans with long pigtails, armed with swords and muzzle-loaders with antelope-horn rests, who erupted into the scene with much shouting. We could not escape since a vertical rock cliff of over 2,000 ft. towered behind us, and the boiling Rongshar river was only a few feet away. Immediately a noisy and furious argument started, with much gesticulating and shouting. Angtharkay (the head sherpa), all of five feet tall, seemed incandescent with fury. As the whole argument was conducted in Tibetan, we had no idea what it was about.

Angtharkay (c.) with Shipton (r.)

“After ten minutes of this Angtharkay came over to us and suggested that we four Europeans should retire a suitable distance away while he and the other Sherpas sort things out. After a further twenty minutes he returned with a broad grin. ‘Everything is settled,’ he said, ‘but I am afraid it will cost you seven rupees to buy them off.’ Ten rupees had been demanded, but Angtharkay had considered this exorbitant. The shouting had been the negotiations.”

All returned safely to England, and a new route to climb Everest had been found.

My father was never one to spontaneously break into tales of his exploits, but when I could coax him to speak about his various adventures (and Everest 1951 and ‘53 were only the first of many), his eyes would light up as, in his mind’s eye, he would step back into his climbing boots and walk into these stunning landscapes, unmapped regions of the earth that he was amongst the first westerners to explore.

I recall, aged around 9 or 10, venturing with him into the Harrods bookstore and discovering for the first time the Tintin series of original graphic novels. I scanned the brightly illustrated covers which promised exciting adventures underseas, in the jungle, on a crashed asteroid, and even in space. Where to begin?

My father spoke: “Well, you’re going to have to pick one of them.”

Then my eye fell upon the only possible choice:

The cover scene was eerily similar to the one my father had lived through in real life.

I beamed as I handed the book to the cashier.

“My dad met a yeti once,” I proudly announced as she rang me up.

The cashier smiled indulgently at me and then my dad: “Oh really, how interesting.”

My father, with the smallest hint of a grin, handed over his money and said not a word.

Footnote: First serialized in 1958, Tintin in Tibet was Herge’s personal favorite among his many tales of the young reporter, and was no doubt influenced by my father’s well-publicized yeti photos, as well as by the author’s own fascination with the mysticism of Tibetan Buddhism. He wrote it as a personal journey of redemption during a period of crisis, when he was assailed by recurring nightmares of “the beauty and cruelty of white”. His Jungian psychoanalyst told him he needed to destroy “the white demon of purity” in his mind. One imagines that some climbers who have come near to death as they pursue their passion for ascending into the highest realms of the earth are well acquainted with “the beauty and cruelty of white.”

This is Part 2 of my reminiscences about my father’s role in the First Ascent of Everest and 1951 Everest Reconnaissance. You can read Part 1 – “Watching Dad on Everest” here, and Part 3 – “My Dad on Everest and Beyond”, here.

The successful 1953 expedition — my father, tanned and dark haired with beard, is in the middle of the front standing row.

It was on this day, the 29th May, sixty years ago, that two men – Edmund Hillary of New Zealand and Tenzing Norgay of Nepal – stepped onto the highest point on Planet Earth, five vertical miles above the palm trees and distant twinkling ocean waters I can currently see from my window. And on that day my dad, along with the other members of the 1953 British Expedition that was endeavoring to claim those virgin snows for a fading empire, busied himself on the lower reaches of the mountain, anxiously awaiting news from the wind-swept slopes above .

When the news finally broke in England of the British expedition’s successful ascent (and it was an ascent in every sense of the word: physically, logistically, aspirationally, scientifically and – perhaps most importantly to a country still struggling with the lingering privations of the War – spiritually), it was the morning of the young Queen’s Coronation. The ultimate production number now had the ultimate curtain-raiser. Can you imagine what was going through her head as she labored out of her royal jammies (hand-tailored by Royal Appointment) into her coronation robes? “Top that, Victoria!”

Back on Everest, as the successful climbers returned to the lower camps, they were greeted with tea (for Tenzing, on the left), warm lemonade (for Hillary, on the right), and, I fervently want to believe, a plate of chocolate digestive biscuits (it’s a British thing). They’d certainly earned it.

And as you look at the film of the returning conquerors of the high, thin air, there you can see my father, smiling along with everybody else, all stoically clapping each other on the back with typical British restraint. It’s one of those occasions when I marvel at my countrymen’s inclination towards emotional restraint in circumstances that would send Americans (and most nationalities, let’s be honest) into fevered paroxysms of celebration. In fact, as my father wrote: “No member of the party was particularly elated…. Our first feelings in success were those of relief.” Relief that no one had died in the attempt, and, perhaps, relief that no other country had nabbed the prize from under the noses of the British, who had always felt the mountain was theirs to claim (the Swiss had come within 800 ft. of the summit the year before).

In the evocative documentary of the 1953 Ascent, The Conquest of Everest (which is also mildly – but understandably – jingoistic, and occasionally inaccurate), you can see dad laboring through the trickiest part of the climb — the icefall — fixing ropes and cutting foot-holds for the legions of sherpas and climbers who will follow, carrying supplies destined for the upper reaches of the mountain.

The icefall is aptly named. It’s as if a god of earlier mythology — a titan, perhaps, in the mood for mischief — had taken a series of high waterfalls and raging rapids, frozen and enlarged them, then put them on a slow-moving rubber conveyor-belt which will stop, stretch, then restart with a massive ping!, sending avalanches of snow and ice hurtling down through the canyons of vertical white and deep-frozen blue. Hidden crevasses with hungry mouths and bottomless maws lurk beneath the sparkling surface, ready to swallow unwary interlopers. The bottom of the icefall occasionally yields up the dismembered corpses of its hapless victims.

The narrator sets the scene in those deliciously clipped BBC tones of the period, savoring every last ‘r’ of the script’s alliteration: “The ice is always on the move — crrrrracking, rrrrroarrrring, rrrrrumbling… Ward is fixing guide ropes…. This place has a name — the climbers called it ‘The Nutcracker’: no one knew if it was opening — or closing.” Cut to an avalanche sweeping down the mountain. When I first watched this footage aged around 8, I thought: “My god, that’s my dad!!! ” and, even though he was sitting next to me: “He’s going to die!!”

Yup, these were our home movies and family snapshots.

Dad (r.) “relaxing” in the icefall

But I am getting ahead of myself. This story actually begins a few years earlier, in 1951, after the Chinese had invaded Tibet, cutting it off from the outside world. It was through Tibet, which bordered Everest to the north, that every assault on the mountain had hitherto been made. Nepal, to the South, was unknown territory: barely mapped or explored by Westerners.

My dad, then 25, was already a highly skilled and respected climber. When it came to hanging on in life, he did it literally – and often – usually leading the routes he was climbing.

Well-versed in the history of Everest exploration he played a hunch and descended into the spectacularly disorganized archives in the basement of the Royal Geographical Society. He rummaged around in drawers full of loose, un-filed materials, examining thousands of photos from earlier expeditions for clues as to what lay on the mountain’s southern side, until – in a true Indiana Jones moment – he found what he had only suspected might be there. Out of an unmarked brown envelope tumbled secret photos of Everest taken by spy planes during the war, and (music swells, camera zooms in) a forgotten map, compiled from photos and a photogrammetric survey carried out in 1935. A sketchy map, with plenty of empty space on it, but a map nevertheless.

The Milne-Hinks Map

First Flight over Everest, 1933

It all added up to clear evidence of a possible route up Everest from the south, through Nepal.

He took his findings to the newly-formed Himalayan Committee, which was responsible for administering all expeditions to the region. In bravura bureaucratic fashion, it immediately distinguished itself by pouring cold water on the whole idea. Undeterred, he began organizing an expedition anyway. He brought in Bill Murray, a pioneer of Scottish winter climbing, and therefore familiar with some of the more extreme weather conditions they could expect to find on Everest.

Also onboard was Tom Bourdillon, a rocket scientist, and one of the best British climbers of his generation. With the addition of Eric Shipton, an iconoclastic veteran of Everest, as expedition leader, the Himalayan Committee finally acceded, and The Times newspaper provided the necessary financial backing.

Further members of the team assembled as the expedition trekked in through the foothills of the Himalayas. The sherpas were led by the legendary Angtharkay, described by Shipton as “absolutely steady in any crisis — outstandingly the best of all the sherpas I have known.” Then, one day on the trail, as described by my father in Everest: One Thousand Years of Exploration: “two New Zealanders, Earle Riddiford and Edmund Hillary, came surging up the hill brandishing enormous Victorian-style ice-axes. Expecting to see a group of well-dressed Englishmen, they were surprised and perhaps a little disconcerted to find that, if anything, we were scruffier than they were.”

Moving along broken trails, crossing raging rivers on rickety bridges, suffering through the tail-end of monsoon season and all its attendant miseries of rain, mud and leeches, the team made the first walk-in to what would later become the world’s busiest (and filthiest) camp site: Everest base camp.

In his autobiography my father wrote: “I was continuously amazed by the stark beauty of the mountains and by the steepness and incisiveness of their faces and ridges. The sherpas always rejoiced in the beauty of their country and though I thought this might be a case of special pleading, the three days’ walk up to the foot of the Khumbu glacier represents one of the most memorable experiences that I have ever had.”

They passed by the monastery of Thyangboche, at 12,000 feet standing as gaunt (if not as precipitously) as the monastery in Powell and Pressburger’s hallucinatory Himalayan fantasy, Black Narcissus.

Movie mountains and monastery…

Looming over Thyangboche monastery is one of the most spectacular mountains in the world, Ama Dablam: ‘Ama’ meaning mother, and ‘Dablam’ meaning the locket in which Sherpa women keep their valuables.

“A gigantic tooth, rearing into the sky”, wrote my father, “it dominated the monastery and the whole area, its upper wedged-shaped ice slopes serrated by the wind and glistening in the sun. The lower part spread out massively into knife-edged black rock-ridges. This was without question the most staggering of all the peaks that I had ever seen”

… the Real Thing.

My dad would return to the mountain during the pioneering Silver Hut expedition of 1960/61, when a team of climber scientists would live a whole winter at an altitude of over 19,000 feet, performing high altitude research. He would lead a successful first ascent of Ama Dablam, but not without incredible drama along the way. Near the summit, a sherpa fell, breaking his leg. Being so high on such a tricky technical route, all ice and precipices, this could have been a death sentence. Instead my dad got him down safely by trussing him up like a chicken, then carrying him down vertical rock and ice faces in relays with other team members — one climber with the sherpa on his back would descend, unable to look at his feet, while his companion would physically move his feet from one toe-hold to another.

But now, here, in the shadow of Ama Dablam, poised on the edge of this pioneering adventure in their own Shangri-la, these last true explorers of the British Empire paused and looked towards the distant bulk of Everest, a conglomeration of peaks whose huge mass dwarfs everything around it.

The Everest group, upper left, (with snow plume coming off the distant summit), with Ama Dablam (right), looming over Tyangboche monastery barely visible on the ridge in middle of photo.

Above the sheer wall of Lhotse peaks the distant summit – swept almost black by the wind — barely visible as it claws at the dark blue of space like some vast volcanic spur of alien rock.

“Walking, as I had that day, straight towards the Everest group of peaks”, my father wrote, “I had been overwhelmed by the sheer audacity and steepness of the more immediate mountains that seemed to hang over my head. In the distance I could just see the top of Everest peeping over the nearer wall formed by Everest and Lhotse, which never seemed to get closer. The crest of the Everest-Lhotse wall, 25-26,000 feet, towered at least two vertical miles above my head. At its base were rock pinnacles and snow humps of 21,000 feet which on their own might have been considered peaks, yet in this setting appeared insignificant.”

Everest from Kalar Patar

They arrived at the foot of the Khumbu glacier, “a horrible maze of ice lumps, and covered in unstable stones. To carry loads up this way was to have a glimpse into purgatory.”

They were at the gateway to the Western Cwm, a massive snow valley which swept upwards towards the steep Lhotse face that led up to the South Col, the inhospitable staging-post from which the summit attack could be launched. Two years later, it was the struggle to ascend this 4000 ft. wall to the South Col that would almost be the undoing of the British attempt on the summit.

But now, between them and the Cwm, lay the daunting obstacle of the icefall.

It was decided they were not all fit enough to tackle this yet, so they split up to scan this massive complex of constantly shifting ice towers and crevasses from neighbouring peaks and slopes.

During the following days my father embarked on the type of exploratory mountaineering — walking and climbing off the map, if you will — that was to become his passion for the rest of his life.

Eric Shipton and Reconnaissance Party, 1951

“This was my first taste of mountain exploration and I was fascinated by the mystery of penetration into unknown country. The disciplines and margins of mountain travel are as absolute as those of any scientific subject…. The uppermost feeling was an intense curiosity to see what the next bit of country looked like.”

1951 Reconnaissance

“The urge to go on and on, continually finding out what is round the corner or over a pass, together with the pleasure of seeing it all fit in place, like a giant’s jigsaw, became to me one of the most fascinating aspects of mountaineering, and this was my first experience of it.”

The team reconvened at the base of the icefall, fully aware of the considerable danger that awaited them from hidden crevasses and flash avalanches that swept through its icy terrain.

But they were determined to break through to the Western Cwm, to look up through its snow fields towards their eventual goal.

(l.-r.) Everest, Nuptse, Lhotse, with Icefall, 1951

In the movie of this moment, these men look down the valley which leads back to Thyangboche, last outpost of civilization. They turn and look at each other, channeling craggy Sam Shepard in “The Right Stuff” as he eyes his experimental jet-plane with a view to breaking the sound barrier. In silence the decision is made. They hoist their rucksacks, grab their ice axes, and turn into the wind.

Moving off, they disappear into their map’s white empty spaces, and the cold embrace of the icefall.

This is Part 1 of a three-part series of reminiscences about my father’s role in the historic expeditions to climb Mt. Everest. You can read Part 2 – “My Dad, the Yeti, and Me” here, and Part 3 – “My Dad on Everest and Beyond”, here.